Wednesday, April 15, 2015

It’s funny – in
both senses of the word – how many people think that awareness of foreign food
started with Elizabeth David and stayed that way for ages. Now, I accept that
David’s Mediterranean Cookery burst upon a grey, post-War scene of austerity in
1950 and brought quite a lot of sunlight into that world for the few who bought
it.

And they were,
indeed, few. Elizabeth David was very active during the 1950s but her time came
with the age of permissiveness, the Swinging Sixties. By then, the world was
more accepting of the kind of gospel which she so eloquently preached.

As a result, it’s
easy to lose sight of important milestones in comparatively recent cookbook
history and a case in point is Plats du
Jour or Foreign Food by Patience Gray and Primrose Boyd, which appeared in
1957. Unlike Ms David’s books, at least initially, it was a runaway success,
what these days would be called a publishing sensation. Within a few months, it
had sold over 50,000 copies and it continued to sell vigorously right into the
1960s.

I love that
subtitle: Foreign Food. It promised
something beyond the pedestrian drudgery of the familiar domestic kitchen, and
the illustrations, by the just-graduated David Gentleman, expressed not just a
lusty joie de vivre but also, very clearly, the notion that there are societies were food and the sharing of
food is central and sacred. I like the fact that on the front cover we can see two bottles of wine being opened at the
same time.

I have a theory
that Elizabeth David, while undoubtedly a missionary of sorts, was essentially
writing for, if not the converted, at least for the cook who was used to a bit
of adventure in the kitchen.

In Plats du Jour, there is no such
assumption. In fact, you could give a copy of it to a young person embarking on
their first experience of independent living and they could use it as a very
instructive manual. There’s a chapter on Pots, Pans, and Stoves, one on The
Store Cupboard, another on Aromatics.

In the chapter
Applying The Heat we have a concise description of cooking methods from
braising to roasting and from larding to poaching. This is an eminently
practical book.

I looked for Plats du Jour in the index to David Kynaston’s Modernity
Britain: Opening the Box 1957-59 (Bloomsbury), part of his magisterial and
vastly entertaining account of recent British history, but to no avail.

1957 saw Harold
Macmillan succeed Anthony Eden as Prime Minister and soon afterwards he claimed
that “most of our people have never had it so good.” This year also saw Britain
test its first nuclear bomb in the Pacific, an infamous fire at Windscale (now
Sellafield) and Andy Kapp making his first appearance in the Daily Mirror.

This was the world
into which Plats du Jour was
launched, precisely half-way between the publication of Elizabeth David’s Summer Cooking in 1955 and her French Provincial Cooking in 1960.

The language may
be a little stilted and formal (Patience Gray’s parents were immigrants from
Eastern Europe who appear to have taken Englishness very seriously) but the
opening lines are, in their own way, rather splendid:

In this book we have tried to set down the recipes for
a number of dishes of foreign origin, in the belief that English people may be
stimulated to interpret them, and in doing so find fresh interest in the
kitchen. The difficulty lies in the diversity of methods used to achieve
similar results, in conveying the timing in preparation and the texture and
appearance of the finished dish. If the cook has not some vague conception of
what it should be like, some recollection to fall back on, it is unlikely that
a recipe is sufficient to act as an infallible guide….

This is the very
antithesis of the grinning celebrity chef telling how everything is “so easy
and so quick”.

I also like this
sentiment:

Where the occasion is a special one, a pâté,
or an extravagance in the form of Dublin Bay prawns or smoked salmon, may be
called for to precede a Daube à la provençale or Poulet à l’estragon.
But barring such exceptions, the liberating idea prevails, a concentration of
culinary activity, a close attention to a particular dish, which, once
composed, can often be left to combine its flavours in a slow oven, later to be
enjoyed with a glass of enhancing wine.

And, apart from
anything else, just look at the use of commas; in this kind of writing, they
are precision instruments.

It would be
tedious to quote a lot of recipes but I just want to point out one, which could
have been written yesterday – by an experienced cook and a talented wielder of
the pen (perhaps Miles Jupp’s Damien Trench?):

SALSA VERDE

Reduce the following ingredients to a molecular state
with a heavy chopping knife or mezzaluna; 1 dessertspoonful of capers, 2
anchovy fillets, 1 shallot, and 1 clove of garlic. Put this preparation into a
sauceboat, and add to it a tablespoonful of very finely chopped parsley and
basil. Dilute with 3 tablespoonfuls of good olive oil, and the juice of 1 lemon.

Basil and “good
olive oil”. I suspect that would have entailed a trip to Old Compton Street in
1957. And just look at those lovely Oxford commas.

Plats du Jour is a gem of book and while it does have a certain
period charm, the essence of what it is about is as fresh today as when it
first appeared.

There are lots of
copies available on www.abebooks.co.uk
from as little as £8.50; and it was reprinted by Persephone Books in 2006.

Thursday, May 15, 2014

When I created Aodhghán
Feeley NT, the veteran defender of “Irish family values” in The Sunday Tribune,
I gave this ghastly man what I considered to be an appropriate car: a Morris
Marina.

Now, bear in mind that this
was the mid-1990s, so it became increasingly implausible that a Morris Marina
would have survived that long. Surely it would have decomposed by about 1985?

So, I dispatched the Marina
with the help of Aodhghán’s wife, the lovely Breda, who "accidentally" cut the
brake fluid line with a bread knife. I nearly dispatched Mr Feeley too, of
course, but he had a miraculous escape on the Mullingar by-pass.

I replaced the Marina with a
Lada Riva 1600 in a fetching shade of beige and Aodhghán would occasionally
mention the car’s “1600cc’s of silken power purring beneath the bonnet” on his
long trips to Knock and various anti-divorce rallies around the island.

I could, of course, have
given him a Skoda but I’m not sure any of them had survived at that stage. And
they would have been a bit rakish for Aodhghán anyway. We are talking of the
Skoda S110 that I think was knocking round during my last couple of years in
secondary school. One of my father’s friends had a 1963 (or thereabouts)
Octavia which I thought, as an infant, rather cooler than our neighbour’s
Renault Dauphine. (I still think it looks better. By a short head).

That Lada Riva of Mr F’s was
based, loosely, on the Fiat 124 of 1966 but with additional Russian
undependability and a weight that owes much to the Soviet bloc’s liberal
attitude with steel. The Skodas of the same vintage may have been a bit of a
joke (especially the coupés) but they had some degree of…okay, not elegance,
exactly, but a certain je ne sais quoi.
Or to,co nevím, possibly.

Skoda is one of the five
oldest car producers, alongside Tatra, Daimler, Opel and Peugeot. Or so Wikipedia
tells me, but it has the ring of truth.

Before World War II it
produced some glorious machines, like the Skoda Popular Kupé of 1934 and Skoda
Rapid convertible of 1935. Even Communism didn’t entirely destroy the brand but
by the 1980s it was the butt of jokes.

Much of the smirking stopped
in the year 2000 when Skoda was bought, as every schoolchild knows, by
Volkswagen. Indeed, VW had taken a stake in the company soon after the fall of
the Berlin Wall.

I have, like the Skibbereen Eagle, been keeping an eye on
Skoda for two decades now. I’m not sure what kindled the initial attraction –
perhaps a perverse enjoyment of going against the flow – but what started with
a few flirtatious glances has ended up as a full-blown love affair. Especially
since the current range of grilles were introduced. I know. I am a bit superficial.

One catalyst in the thing was
the reaction of a friend of mine (who has a trust fund and a Range Rover Sport,
‘nuff said) when I told him that I quite fancied an Octavia Combi (as we
Skodaheads must refer to the estate version; it's a silly word for a serious thing). “Oh,” he said. “Well, if you got one
of those I would have to avoid you in public places.”

Yes, even in 2013 (this
happened last year), people like that think like that, and I suspect they will
continue to do so. They don’t sneer at Audis, of course. They tolerate
Volkswagens. They are aware of SEATs. But they still look down their noses at
Skodas.

Well that’s part of the
appeal for me. It’s the pleasure of driving a car rather than a badge. A
feeling of tremendous smugness at having dispensed with the bullshit and
concentrated on what matters. How the car performs. And how it looks, of
course. I refuse to drive ugly cars. There’s enough ugliness in the world
without adding to it by going around in, say, a Nissan Tiida. God forbid.

I liked the Skoda Octavia
Combi 1.6 diesel and its combination of practicality and frugality. I got
something in the mid 60s in terms of m.p.g. (that’s around 4.3 l/100km) but the
105bhp engine meant that I spent a lot of time shooting up and down the 5
forward gears. It was not a car that brought out the enthusiastic driver in me
but it certainly had capacity – with decent legroom in the back and a huge load
space behind that. I was constantly surprised that people tend to speak of the
Octavia in the same breath as the VW Golf.

It was black and looked
absolutely lovely in my humble and possibly skewed opinion. I adored the
curious fold lines on the tailgate (although I must confess I got a bit of
start when I noticed them, in low light in a car park and feared the worst.

I liked the solidity, the
amount of stuff shared with VWs (virtually everything you can see from the
driver’s seat) and – this may surprise you – the Skoda typeface that appears,
for example, on the speedometer. I like its distinctive sans-serif elegance.
It’s called Skoda Pro and you and you can have a dekko here: http://www.motaitalic.com/news/skoda-custom-type/

However, when I had to hand
it back, I didn’t yearn for this Octavia because, the simple truth is, I found
it under-powered, with 105bhp. Not by much, but by enough to take the sheen of
the experience.

Then, a few weeks later I
tried the 2.0 litre version (delivering 148bhp) with the added bonus of 4-wheel
drive. And a 6-speed gearbox. The difference was vast. The same solidity was
there and all the other virtues noted in the weaker sibling but this car had
capability. The 0 – 62 mph figure of a little over 8 seconds (bearing in mind
that this is a practical car, not a performance one) seems modest, oddly
enough, when compared the lively sensation when you’re actually driving it. And
I mean really lively.

And then came the cavernous,
capacious Skoda Superb Combi 2.0 TDI 4 x 4 about which, to be honest, I was a
little sceptical at first. It has 633 litres of load space, 1,865 litres with
the seats down. There ‘s all manner of clever touches in the loadspace from
tethering points, luggage belt to a way of compartmentalising the area.

And this car sure has
presence. Very considerable presence.

Well, my scepticism lasted
just until I took it on to the M50. How, I wondered, would a 2 litre engine
manage to haul such a behemoth around without flagging?

I need not have worried. The 140bhp
engine was more than adequate for the job (so much so, I wonder what the 170
bhp version would be like; or the 260bhp petrol version which, somehow, I can’t
see selling very well).

In terms of the usefulness of
the 4 x 4, it’s a very sure-footed beast. I took it off-road in the
Knockmealdowns for a few miles and where a normal car, even a substantial one,
might have slid occasionally or fought for grip, the Skoda was a steady as a
rock. In fact, as an occasional Land Rover driver, I had to remind myself that
the Skoda is just a car and therefore pretty close to the ground. You could get
into trouble.

We’re talking permanent
4-wheel drive here, of course; there’s no diff lock or anything to confuse
anyone who has never driven a proper Land Rover. And it’s the Haldex system
that goes into the stupidly expensive Audi Allroads and the Volvo XCs.
Essentially, it delivers power mainly to the front wheels in normal driving
conditions but will compensate for any slippage by dividing power according to
where it is needed.

The car tested is known as
the Ambition (a step up from the entry level Active) and it has quite a few
extras from fog lights with corner function and heated front seats to tyre
pressure monitoring and parking sensors. All for under €35,000. The Octavia
Combi 4 x 4 with its more powerful engine weighs in just under €31,000. It
would be a tough choice for me, to be honest; they are surprisingly different
cars but equally attractive.

Anyway, as Top Gear summed it
all up very neatly “More car, less badge.”

Actually, that doesn’t quite
sum it up for me, although I know what they are getting at. Skoda is a badge
that does it for me: quality, decent prices, understated elegance, efficiency.
When you think about it, this is the opposite of vulgar. And it’s pretty darn
confident too.

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

I think I can pinpoint the
time when my fascination with the internal combustion engine started. I was
about six and I had been invited to a friend’s birthday party at Dublin Zoo,
which was pretty exciting in itself.

But further excitement was
provided by the fact that his father would drive us there – something that I
found terribly exotic because my
father, a somewhat eccentric Luddite, refused to have a car.

The apogee of excitement,
however, came with the car that my friend’s dad was driving. It was a black
Citroen DS, sleek, futuristic, with a ride as smooth as velvet and – this was
the thing that captured my imagination – it rose up when it took to the road
and, in a sense, knelt down when it poured forth us very little boys at the
gates of the Zoo.

The friend’s dad was, I seem
to remember, an architect. He wore a bow tie and smoked what I later realised
were Gitanes. The Citroen DS, with its positively space age technology and that
seriously funky steering wheel, was just the car for such a bloke.

The DS came back into my life
briefly in the 1970s when I used to travel around the conifer county of Surrey
in a venerable sky-blue limousine version (in the front), but that’s another
story

As a teenager, I coveted the
Citroen-Maserati SM (we tend to forget that Citroen used to own a chunk of
Maserati). Citroen did the comfort while Maserati provided the power in the
form of a 2.5 litre fuel-injected engine. There was a silver one parked outside
the old Royal Hibernian Hotel on Dawson Street regularly and I used to drool
over it while heading to Graham O’Sullivan’s for coffee, Gitanes smoke (there’s
a theme here) and angst-ridden chats with my school mates.

Citroen lost its way in more
recent years. After the CX (1974-1991) and the XM (1989-2000) the brand
collapsed into blandness, dubious dependability and somewhat tinny build
quality. The quirky, eccentric, forthrightly Gallic originality of Citroen’s
core values was lost to the likes of the Xantia (which I strongly suspect you
can’t picture in your mind; I struggle to do so).

Well, times have changed and
Citroen, the old Citroen spirit, is back. I drove three models recently and all of
them had, for a start, a solidity and quality of build that had been
conspicuously absent from the brand for yonks. I know I tend to go on about it,
but when I close the driver’s door, I want to hear a certain sound. Ideally a
bass-toned clunk. I got it with all three Citroens.

The new "DS" theme involves Citroen’s renewed embrace of clever, original design to give the models in question a certain
extra je ne sais quoi.

First there was the DS3
Cabriolet, a sprightly little 1.6 litre petrol enginedtwo-door with a roof which retracts the whole
way, exposing a great deal of sky above one’s noggin. I didn’t spend a lot of
time in this mode, due to the Winter we have been experiencing but I can
confirm that you can see a lot of sky.

Whingers have complained that
you can’t see out the back window when the roof is fully retracted. I would
argue that this doesn’t actually matter, provided you know how to use your wing
mirrors.

The 118bhp engine is lively,
with a surprising amount of oomph even from low revs and it is certainly a lot
of fun to drive. On the flip side, it’s not entirely sure-footed on some of our
less than smooth roads and there can be a bit of hoppity, skip and jump when
cornering.

This is a small, neat car but
nevertheless it gets 5 stars in Euro NCAP crash test and comes with 6 airbags.

Then I switched to the DS5
which is somewhere in the same category as the Passat or, perhaps, the Audi A5.
It’s certainly stylish. Those sculpted twin exhausts look wonderful and the
cabin feels very much designed as a unit rather than mixed up from standard components.
It’s elegant, tactile, with hints from the aviation sector.

The 158bhp 2.0 litre diesel I
drove is sprightly too and very much more than adequate to haul the fairly
considerable weight. My only real gripe was the ride. It’s probably fine on the
smooth roads of European neighbours. In Ireland, and especially outside the
city, every bump is acutely felt and, like the DS3, there’s a slight lack of
sure-footedness on tight bends where the surface is less than billiard-table
smooth.

Overall, including a fair
amount of motorway driving, I averaged somewhere in the high 40s in terms of
mpg (I think in old money, I’m afraid.)

And then… and then came the
revelation, the C4 Picasso (no DS this time) with its Tardis-like qualities. At first glance,
it’s a moderately sized MPV. Quite neat, rather understated in terms of design
but aerodynamic if deceptively like a normal car sitting on a booster seat.

But inside, it’s a very
different story. The C4 Picasso, once you sit into it, is huge. The sense of
space is almost bizarre and yet, when you drive it, it handles like the size it
really is.

The 1.6 HDi engine, which I
expected to struggle with all that, well, all that sense of space is more than
up to the job while delivering fuel consumption, in my case at any rate, pushing
into the high 60s in terms of mpg.

Being an MPV, you don’t tend
to drive it like the other two cars mentioned above but, notwithstanding that,
I reckon it has a lot less body roll than most MPVs and the ride is supremely
comfortable.

In fact, just to make another
foray into my childhood, my uncle had a Rover 3.5 P5 in 1970 and I remember
sinking into the seats with a sense of luxury that was rare indeed when one’s
benchmark was the Ford Anglia or the Fiat 125.

Well, sitting in to the
driver’s seat in the C4 Picasso that memory came back to me. Let’s just say
that I was impressed.

And I’m not the only one. The
C4 Picasso is Irish Car of the Year 2014.

Thursday, November 14, 2013

I once had a pretty heavy
Volvo habit. It started in a small way, when I fell in love at the age of 12
with the old 145. I knew enough Latin by then to know that Volvo means "I roll". You have to remember that this was 1971, a time when Volvo
was relentlessly Swedish and seemed, by comparison to normal cars, to have been
carved out of a single metal ingot. Solid is not an adequate word.

One of my early loves...

Hard as it may be for younger
folk to understand, Volvo had a certain coolness. And then they ruined it all
with the introduction of the 244 which looked like a slab with a kind of snowplough
stuck on the front. Even as a child, I felt that this was the antithesis of
aerodynamicism. And it was ugly.

See what they did?

But this was a mere lovers’
tiff. By the time I reached man’s estate I returned to Volvo with a vengeance.
First there was a 244DL maroon saloon that nearly dislocated both of my
shoulders thanks to an absence of PAS (hard to imagine these days). In time,
this car gave me biceps like I’ve never had before or since.

In time, I graduated to a 240GL
estate in the kind of blue favoured by the Legion of Mary. I wasn’t choosy; I
just felt (and I think I still do) that God created Volvos to be estates.
Saloons have never looked quite right to me.

I hope you will forgive a
digression here. Speaking of the saloon/estate issue can anyone honestly say
that an Audi A4 looks as good as an Audi A4 Avant? And, while we’re on the
subject of Audis, just think of the A5. See what I mean? Cars that are,
essentially, a big box sandwiched by two smaller boxes are struggle against all
the odds to be elegant. Even the Maserati Quattroporte. Now, there’s a car I’d
like to see in a “shooting brake” (nothing so utilitarian as an estate)
version.

Anyway, where was I? Yes. Then
there was the 240 GLT estate in silver with as many bells and whistles as you
could hope for in a 1987 car; I loved it. And after a flirtation with Land
Rover, it was back to Volvo, a saloon admittedly but a rather attractive 850 GLT
that got me my first speeding ticket and which eventually threatened to drain
my pockets dry with the fuel bill.

I’d been away from Volvo for
quite a while when I sat into this bright red V40 T2 R-Design, a modestly
proportioned car that is aimed, essentially, at the same part of the market as
the Audi A3.

Nice. The car. Not my ghostly finger tip.

Hang on, a moment. Let’s step
out of it, for a moment. The Volvo V40 is a very lovely car in appearance. It
has more than a dash of the supremely elegant, almost futuristic P1800 that
even those whose veins are not filled with four star unleaded will recall as
the car that Simon Templar drove in The Saint. Yes, that’s how old poor Roger
Moore really is.

The legendary P1800. Estate version looks a little like a Reliant Scimitar. But better.

Anyway, back inside. As soon
as I did sit in, I realised that some things don’t change about Volvo. Their
seats are always excellent and these ones seemed to have maximum lumbar support
and a rather comforting embrace.

The V40's cabin.

Other things don’t change
either, and they are not immediately obvious. Safety is every car producer’s
concern these days but Volvo remains out front, well ahead of the posse. Back
in 1944 when most of Europe thought about safety in terms of bombproof
shelters, Volvo introduced the world’s first safety cage. They did the same
with the 3-point seat belt in the year of my birth (and that’s more years ago
than I care to remember, as the late Harry Moore used to say).

When people used to dress up to show off the latest seat belt.

The innovation
goes on: there was the first side air-bag in 1994 and now, invisible beneath
the bonnet of the bright red V40 which I was about to drive, the world’s first pedestrian air-bag. Volvo is careful and
considerate.

The world's first pedestrian air-bag.

To misquote Stephen Fry (who
was speaking of a different Scandinavian car brand), “Has anyone ever said
‘Look at that lunatic in the Volvo!’”

There are still people who
think that Volvos are boring, either because they last drove one when most of
them actually were, or because of all this talk of safety. I mean, Lamborghini
don’t talk up the safety features, do they? And even BMW tend to apply the soft
pedal when rehearsing such characteristics.

It’s rather a double-edged
sword. I found the combination of Volvo solidity (with all due respect to Ford,
the V40 didn’t feel Focus-derived),
cocoon-like cabin (as far as the driver is concerned, at any rate) and the
world-leading safety features all very comforting and reassuring.

The car itself, however,
looked like a little beast. Red, as I say, and given the R-Design trim which,
to be brutally honest, looks a touch boy-racerish. And in a slightly aggressive
style. That just seemed rather out of Volvo’s innate character. A Volvo might
be a beast (remember the old T5 which used to be nicked for so many bank
heists?) but in its outward demeanour it should drop only the subtlest of hints
about the fact.

T5. The beast.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I
liked this car. It had an essential Volvoness that spoke directly to my inner
Volvo owner and it was comfortable, refined, impeccably well mannered. But,
dear reader, it was a little disappointing in terms of performance.

And I don’t mean that I
wanted it behave like it looked. It’s just that the 1.6 litre 120bhp petrol
engine seemed, at times, to flag at the task of hauling around quite a lot of car
(despite its category). It wasn’t seriously underpowered; it’s just that the
performance fell a little below what would make the car feel absolutely right.

Not quite me.

I’d imagine that the diesel
D3 with 148bhp would sort out that little problem and, if I were going for one
of them (which is tempting in theory), I’d pass on the R-Design. I had to
switch the dash display to something less games-console themed within minutes
of sitting in to the car – but, to be fair, the clarity of display was first
class. Other controls were, to be honest, a little fiddly at first but after a
week I had the hang of them.

This is a thing I have
noticed about proper, professional car writers (Sam Wollaston excepted, as
always, bless him; he rarely gets down to details). They seem to whinge, to
some extent, about all controls, touchscreens and what have you except those in
BMW, Mercedes and Audi models. I reckon it’s because most of them have the car
for only a week and don’t get used to them.

Looks quite straightforward to me.

I might well be wrong,
though. The last BMW I drove was from the early noughties, the Mercedes was
probably from the Berlin Wall era and the Audi was somewhere in-between.

The more anorakish amongst my
few readers here may have noticed that I didn’t dwell much on the Swedish
thing. Look, I know that this car is made in Belgium and I know that Volvo has
trodden a complex path in terms of the automotive industry but it remains for
me, at heart, Scandinavian.

It’s a personal thing. A
matter of faith. Perhaps you never lose it. Perhaps I’m just a lapsed Volvo
owner who will eventually embrace the faith again. I just might.